The present invention generally relates to the field of information handling systems, and particularly to an electronic program guide utilized by an information handling system.
It is often desirable to provide a program guide in an electronic format that provides programming information such as broadcast or cable television programming schedules for regularly scheduled programs and events. The electronic program guide (EPG) may be compiled by a service provider and delivered to the user via an electronic transmission system. The electronic program guide is then displayable on an information handling system such that the user may view the programming information to decide which programs to watch and at what times to watch them.
One disadvantage of the traditional electronic program guide is that it typically only includes programming content provided by long established airwave television, cable television or satellite television programming sources. In other words, the number of channels or stations included in the program guide is a fixed number based upon the number of available channels in the user""s local geographic region. Often, however, single, transitory events such as a press conference, space vehicle launch, concert, telethon, governmental hearing, etc. will be scheduled to occur and be broadcast over alternative transmission media, and that do not fit into regularly scheduled programming. The alternative transmission medium may be a worldwide network such as the Internet that allows a user to couple to a node of the network far outside of his or her geographical region and time zone and from which the single, transitory event may be broadcast and transmitted to the user via the worldwide network. It would be highly desirable to determine when such transitory broadcasts are scheduled to occur, to determine which nodes of the network the broadcasts will be available, and to include such information in the electronic program guide. Further, since such broadcast events are transitory in nature, it would be highly desirable to provide the broadcast scheduling information as flexible, temporal channels rather than as fixed, long established static channels of traditional broadcast content sources.
The present invention is directed to an electronic program guide system. In one embodiment, the electronic program guide system includes a first information handling system for obtaining programming information from a program information source and generating a program guide based upon the obtained program information, and a second information handling system coupled to the first information handling system, for receiving the program guide by causing the first information handling system to transmit the program guide to the second information handling system. The first information handling system is configured to search a worldwide network for information regarding a transitory broadcast event and to incorporate the transitory event information into the generated program guide prior to transmitting the program guide to the second information handling system.
The present invention is further directed to a method for generating an electronic program guide. In one embodiment, the method includes steps for obtaining program guide information from a program information source, generating a program guide based upon the obtained program guide information, searching a network for information regarding a transitory broadcast event, determining whether a node on the network contains multimedia content, in the event it is determined that the node does not contain multimedia content, continuing with the searching step, otherwise, obtaining multimedia content information stored in the node, determining from the multimedia content information whether the multimedia content is live content, in the event it is determined that the multimedia content is live content, adding the multimedia content information to the program guide, in the event it is determined that the multimedia content is not live content, determining whether the multimedia content is a scheduled live broadcast, in the event it is determined that the multimedia content is a scheduled live broadcast, executing the step for adding the multimedia content information to the program guide, and otherwise continuing with the searching step.